Speaker, Author, CEO

So today on a school day we are up earlier than normal because we are traveling in a caravan with some school parents as our beloved school has qualified for the State Football championship. Today I have officially taken the entire day off, to attend this game with my girls.

This week has been exhausting with some huge business requirements on us, some unbelievable experiences with former contractors/employees and on top of that the usual parent demands in having a successful school week for my young daughters.

So as I’m driving to the nearest Starbucks for some artificial energy on the drive to Orlando this morning, I’m sitting up a bit taller and mentally patting myself on the back as I believe this latest effort of mine has surely solidified my place as a “mother of the year” finalist. As I bask in this realization it most definitely feels like I’ll be surely nominated.

Then reality comes back into my psyche, along with these thoughts of grandeur, I look back to this past summer vacation with two of my best “mom” friends and their daughters, Jeanette and Raj. I remember how we embarrassed our daughters in Leavenworth Washington, by dancing in public in front of them at an outdoor restaurant along a busy tourist street, when eventually all our daughters joined in dance with us.

I begin to think about how each of us, mom’s that do everything in our respective powers to provide amazing academic opportunities and privilege lives for our daughters, we smother our girls with love to the point of our exhaustion, when what in the end I believe is the greatest gift we can give our girls was that we danced for them last summer.

We danced for them as if we hadn’t a care in the world!

The why, is that even with all the pressures the three of us professional working mother’s, A judge, A physician and a CEO, each one of us have learned with these demanding careers how to balance what we can in order to keep our attitude positive and we have learned in our early/mid forties that all we do has to be done in perspective and keeping your perspective given all of life’s trials, is the single most important thing we can teach our daughters!

We danced that night in Leavenworth because our lives are being lived in “perspective”.

That perspective is that life flies by and there isn’t anything more important than that time and space when we are present with our daughters.
I hope that my daughters will grow up remembering that they had a mom who got up at every opportunity and danced, whether I embarrassed them, embarrassed myself or not!

When it comes to hiring…it comes right down to hiring the right people, training them, and essentially cultivating the team.

Since, after all, these are members of the same tree.

Each cherry picked.

Each a part of me and what my company represents.

As I’ve been pouring myself and our executive management’s time into preparing for our very first Annual ECS Conference #EAC in the gorgeous Palm Springs California…I am side tracked by one employees laissez-faire way of communication with a client.

The primary goals of this conference are:

1. Define our company values

2. Train/Educate,

3. Motivate, inspire and build our team.

The timing of this conference comes at a critical growth period; my team has been working very hard.

I know we will have a huge upswing in more business so I’m using this conference in order for us to get ready for the crazy times ahead.

Its great to be “crazy busy” – we want “good, managed, never missing a beat” kind of crazy busy though!

So today, as I’m on my way to this carefully planned out EAC event (which starts with a fabulous dinner tomorrow evening), I peruse through a string of emails. Some that I feel could have been handled in a more effective way.

But, as with most things, challenges like these only force us to collaborate as a team and ultimately clarify what is and what aren’t our team values.

From there, we move forward.

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This blog might seem fairly obvious, because many parents feel the way I do, as this week school resumes for many in the East Coast.

Routine, routine, routine, gotta love it! I certainly do! For me when my daughters go back to school and then resume their extra curricular activities to include involvement in Chess Club, Basketball, Swim Team and Spelling Club, our home because a very oiled machine.

For obvious reasons my daughters routine drives my work life to an extent and certainly drives our family life. Why I think routine is a positive thing is that for me and my daughters it drives us to be better organized and find priority and importance on our daily tasks.

For example, this past weekend we had a meeting, meaning I called my daughters together and said we needed a conference. My oldest daughter termed it a “P to K” meeting, (parent to kid) I love it.

During this P to K meeting we discussed how we can find at least 40 minutes during the work week or in their school week to find reading time. Their school told us that C students read 1 minute per day, B students read 5 minutes per day and A students read 20 minutes per day. Both my daughters are A students and my expectation was that they read 40 minutes per day at a minimum. So together we decided that on their ride to and from school they would read, this should get them to 40 minutes at best and at least I knew they would get in their 20 minutes.

This being efficient with their time idea is how we make our schedule work, and of course it doesn’t hurt that my daughters love to read and we always have at least 40 books in the back of my car (at least 40).

So due to the demands of the “routine” of school, which can be likened to the “routine” of being on endless conference calls or the “routine” of hours of email processing, this demands that we look at making all we do as efficient as possible….at least during with work week!

Because I’ve always (college intern IBM) been wired in some way in my career, being so completely wired these days to so many multiple devices has happened for me and my family and team in such a gradual and unsuspecting way, that it doesn’t phase me in the least.

I remember when we started taking out of the country vacations when the economy and business was great, I appreciated being in Ireland without cell service, I remember finding the one (1) coin operated internet cafe in Tahiti and I remember feeling liberated and actually fearful that I couldn’t be reached,not really at least not readily for any sort of crisis or emergency while vacationing on a Cruise Ship.

In fact I remember once being in Australia when I discovered in a big way that my team really COULD take on the difficulties in our company without my input. Many managers know that if you don’t respond immediately to requests or issues, in most cases things work out on their own.

So my thoughts on being as wired as we are in the workplace today is of benefit to me, because I seek out opportunities to unplug. Perhaps a bike ride(although my bluetooth Boaz headsets plays Spotify), not answering my phone. Or perhaps swimming laps in the pool (using my waterproof IPOD with my purchased ITunes music). Or perhaps forcing myself to leave my Ipad and Iphone in the car when I walk into a resturart for dinner with my daughters or turning my phone off completely once we land at the beach so I don’t feel like I”m working at all on a saturday or sunday.

I’m happy I’m acutely aware during my work hours of being constantly wired so that I can be constantly available to our clients and our team, but my priorities are clear. Everything in balance, and all things have a priority level which require being unplugged for. My priorities are in this order:

Typically I am the customer! I am the consumer, many times to the dismay of my Comptroller and acting CFO but it is true. I go to networking functions, business seminars, conferences and I am the consumer in the end and I’ll buy all sort of services and items as I see fit.

Our market in VOIP is specialized and our Niche core business does not lend itself easily to any consumer. I have never owned a business to consumer type of company.

So when a few weeks back I was in the position of actually having a item for sale, and I asked a few of those business contacts to pay it forward so to speak. Some did, most did not and what I was really struck by was those vendors (there were two in particular) who have been marketing to me in an aggressive manner that could have taken advantage of the opportunity at a very low cost to patronize me all in hoping for my patronization. I’m confident it would have paid off and now I’m fairly sure I’ll look elsewhere for those services they were pitching to me. If you want a customer, be a customer!

We enjoyed “prime rib night” at the country club tonight with my business minded father and one of the wisest people I know. Our discussion centered around how much our company (ECS) is growing and how one of my most important charters is to make our company one of the ‘best” places to work.

My father had this to say:

He said we should look at our company as always having two clients, one that pays us and one that we pay. Of course we can define easily those clients that pay us, but our “internal” clients, meaning our team members/employees are more difficult to define.

So the idea here is that if we have a support manager that is focused on taking care of clients that pay us but ignores or lessens the importance of responding to internal clients (that we pay), then we are missing it. Meaning we will not achieve our mission to retain the top talent in our industry.

I’m sure many of you understand that internal business is another business that should employ the same measurement as external business but do we all really FOCUS on our internal client, our employees in this manner? Do we focus on how we take care of our team?Do we focus on how we respond to their demands?

After my discussion with my father (incidentally an MBA candidate), I will take it as my charter with my executive team to ensure WE (ECS) are taking care of our internal clients!